Contents

Posting Rules

This forum is an English-language forum. This means that you will use recognizable English. It also means that you will not use hacker dialect (aka "l33t-speak") or annoying IM habits such as "ur" in place of "you are". You will also use capitalization properly, not to mention punctuation, sentence breaks, paragraphs, etc. If you don't like to type decent English, either learn or leave. Greater allowances for deviation from proper English may be made for those for whom English is a second language, within reason. You must at least give the impression that you are sincerely trying to construct proper English sentences.

This forum is not an "underground" forum. This means that you will refrain from bragging about serious violations of the law that you have committed, you will not solicit or offer pirated software of any kind, you will not incite criminal activities, etc.

Serious lies are not acceptable on this forum. If it is found that you have lied about your identity, your background, your accomplishments, or your status in life, you may face disciplinary action. If you are found to be consistently dishonest in forum discussions, that may also lead to disciplinary action.

On this forum, it is considered perfectly acceptable to flame people simply for being dishonest or stupid, no matter how polite they are. I am aware that on most forums, stupidity or dishonesty alone are not considered grounds for flaming. However, those forums' rules do not apply here.

The "me too" rule. Do not post in threads simply to add some kind of vacuous one-liner. If you're going to post in a thread (particularly a serious discussion thread), you should put some effort into your post.

Controversial opinions are not punished (although dishonest arguments put forth to support them may be; see posting rule #3). However, there are certain exceptions to this rule. People who advocate pedophilia will be summarily banned. The same goes for white supremacists. For that matter, anyone whose behaviour would be considered a violation of Canada's hate speech law may be banned. Also, we have a general moratorium on "Israel vs Palestine" threads because they always go round and round in the same circles. Only post IvP threads involving some genuinely newsworthy recent event, not just to rekindle the debate over which of them is more evil. 1As well, there is a moratorium on versus/hypothetical scenario discussions involving the Gor series, as the misogynist philosophy espoused by the author and some fans of the series is widely agreed to be entirely revolting and without any possible merit, and such threads invariably devolve into genocide fantasies with no redeeming value.

Explicit pornographic images may not be directly posted on this forum, although links to sites containing such material may be acceptable provided there is a clearly worded warning.

Posts are to be made in the relevant forum.

Do not post in an old, inactive thread unless you have something genuinely new and interesting to add to it. This is known as thread necromancy.

If you intend to start a debate, search the forum and the associated websites first, to see if your arguments have been raised before. If you are too lazy to search the forum and the associated websites before launching what you no doubt believe to be an innovative and original argument, then do not complain if you are flamed to a crisp.

You are to use descriptive thread titles. Misleading or non-descriptive thread titles will be edited. Users who continue to use such titles after being warned may be disciplined.

Spam is not tolerated. Anyone posting unsolicited advertisements on this forum will be instantly banned.

Do not over-use smilies. This is, of course, a subjective rule, but let's just say that it's definitely over-use when more of your post is composed of smilies than text. Lesser examples will rely on more of a judgement call.

News articles are to be posted in full. There are some places where such is rather difficult, because of need of user registration or format. These will be the only exception of this particular rule.

Debating Rules

Do not "hijack" threads by trying to change the subject in mid-stream. We are aware that a discussion may meander into different tangents and even different subjects without any conscious effort to make it do so. However, there are times when, in the judgement of our staff, someone has deliberately ignored or tried to change the subject of a thread.

The "vendetta" rule: pursuant to the hijacking rule, do not "follow someone around" because you dislike him, hijacking threads in which he participates in order to carry on your feud with him. This particular form of hijacking is considered the least acceptable of all hijacking offenses.

Pursuant to the previous rule, do not start threads solely for the purpose of criticizing an individual member of the board. Only the administrative staff is permitted to attack people in that manner, and they generally do it because the person has broken the rules.

Do not use someone's rudeness as an excuse to ignore his points.

Do not employ the "broken record" debating style. Continuously repeating yourself regardless of what others say is a quick way to get banned.

If you are asked for evidence to support a claim you've made, you should either produce this evidence or concede the point until such time as you can produce this evidence. People who consistently ignore requests for evidence to support their claims (particularly contentious claims) are not looked upon kindly here.

If you dismiss an argument because of its use of profanity, you can be instantly banned.

Administrative Rules

If you have a complaint about another member, contact one of the moderators of the forum in which the alleged offense took place. Do not be a "back-seat moderator". Please note that this complaint should reference one of our rules, not the rules at xyz forum which you prefer over our rules.

If you strongly disagree with our forum's policies, either keep it to yourself or leave. This is our forum, these are our rules, and if you don't like it, there are plenty of other forums out there. If you insist on staying and ranting about how you much you object to our rules, we will make you leave.

Pursuant to the previous rule, if you are upset at the mods for enforcing our rules, either complain privately to an admin (who may or may not ridicule your complaint), keep your trap shut, or leave.

If you have a complaint about the whole board, you are obviously unhappy here, so leave. Complaints like "so this is the way you do things at SD.Net" and "the prevailing attitude here seems to be" etc clearly indicate that you dislike something about our entire board culture and you should leave. If you persist on staying and acting like this, we will make you leave.

If you are found to be harassing another member (particularly a female member, and especially one who is less than 18 years old) via PM or some other means, particularly in a manner that makes the other member feel threatened in some way (such as "stalking", etc), you will be banned. Do not pester female members for personal info, and do not ignore requests to stop bothering them. Do not add lines to your sig to proclaim your love for some female member or declare some membership in a "cult" of worship for her. We are aware that some of you are young and prone to this sort of behaviour, but we do not tolerate it.

Flaming of the staff is permitted, but only with respect to their views stated in any given thread, not their administrative actions. Those who pre-emptively or falsely accuse the moderators of "abuse of power" (a common troll tactic designed to discourage enforcement of rules against them) will be disciplined.

Your User Profile

All avatars are subject to the approval of the staff. If the staff feels that your avatar is offensive or overly irritating, you will be asked to change it.

Sigs are to be limited in size. As a general rule, your sig should not be much taller than mine, and should not contain any images which are larger than 500x100 pixels or bigger than 75 kB. As with avatars, they are subject to the approval of the staff. If the staff feels that your sig is too big, too offensive, or too annoying, you will be asked to change it. The rules for a sig are stricter than the rules for a normal post because a sig will appear on every one of your posts, both new and old.

Users who make "sock puppet" accounts (ie- multiple accounts) for themselves may be disciplined. Users who evade a prior ban or help someone else evade a prior ban will be immediately banned.

Users who leave and demand that we delete their profiles will be ignored. We don't delete profiles for many reasons, such as the fact that all posts made by that person would revert to "Guest".

Users who leave in a huff and publicly demand that we ban them will have their wishes honoured, but they should not expect to be welcomed back after that kind of behaviour.

If you are a well-liked user (or at least not widely hated), we might grant you a name change. But if you ask for more than one name change, we do not guarantee that your new name will be the one you asked for. We might decide that your new username shall be Shit-Eating Fuckface.

Imperial Rules

This forum is private property. More specifically, it is my private property. I own the hardware, I maintain the software, I pay for the bandwidth. You are a guest in my house, and as such, you are subject to our house rules. If you think there is something unjust or unreasonable about our rules, the decisions of the administrative staff, or my behaviour in particular, TOO FUCKING BAD.

The administrative staff will decide what is an appropriate punishment when someone breaks the rules. Sometimes we may be in a lenient mood, but that does not tie our hands for the future.

These rules are here to tell you what you can and can't do, but they do not define "rights" which you can throw in the faces of the administrative staff if they have agreed that you've done something wrong. We have added retroactive rules in the past (eg- the rule about large sigs or harassing females via PM) due to the actions of individual members, and rest assured, we are perfectly willing to do so again. In other words, this is not a court of law. If you find a loophole in our rules, don't be too pleased with yourself because we will simply close it, and then shove it up your ass.

Disciplinary Actions

For a low-level offense, we typically take no direct action except to warn you to correct the problem and/or avoid doing it again in future. In some cases we might apply a derogatory title to your username.

If you ignore a warning (particularly if you ignore repeated warnings), we will usually start removing privileges such as PM privileges, the ability to edit your posts in edit-enabled forums, avatar privileges, sig privileges, etc.

In some cases of severe rule violations, we will ban you. We might also ban you if we launch a ban poll and a majority of users decide that you are worthless. And we might ban you if you react to some lesser disciplinary action (such as a warning, a title, or a privilege removal) with hostility, accusations of unfairness, etc. Bans may be either temporary or permanent, but most bans are permanent.